Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Eclipse Juno

The highlight of the year for the Eclipse community – the largest simultaneous release in their history has arrived. We give you the highlights

The fourth week in June should always be on the minds of any
Eclipse project developer, the end point of a year’s hard grafting
and heavily preparing their part of the Eclipse jigsaw puzzle.

Today, the 9th annual simultaneous release train, Eclipse Juno has
arrived into view, bringing with it 72 projects – the most in
Eclipse history to date. It’s a phenomenal undertaking by the
vibrant community who are always looking to usher in new ideas and
new projects. Ten more promising projects join in the fun from last
year’s Eclipse Indigo an indication of how keen they are to welcome
new converts.

The Eclipse Juno by Numbers should hopefully demonstrate just
why Holger Voormann believes this is “the
best simultaneous release of its time“. He also provided these
lovely graphics demonstrating the growth of Eclipse over the years,
and how it has coped with dealing with bugs during that time.

Eclipse Juno By Numbers

72 projects (95 if broken down into subprojects)

445 open source committers

55 million lines of code,

40+ Eclipse member companies.

It really shouldn’t be underestimated just how large this
release is for the Eclipse community – not only does it welcome in
E4 as the mainstream application platform after four years in the
making, but it represents a big shift for many of the projects
migrating across to Git from SVN and CVS. Wayne
Beaton revealed that around two thirds (61 in the entire 95)
have made the move across before December’s deadline day,
suggesting that that drive had been a success.

Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation was understandably
thrilled with the arrival of the community’s biggest effort so far,
saying:

Each year the commitment and dedication of the Eclipse
committers demonstrate that Eclipse is a great example of open
source distributed development that ships on a predictable
schedule, and scales to tens of millions of lines of
code.

I am especially happy Juno is based on the Eclipse 4.2
platform, thus providing a stable platform for continued innovation
in the Eclipse community.

We at JAX Towers express similar sentiments. Not only do we have
a bumper-packed Java Tech Journal that
looks at some of the projects that appear in Juno in-depth, but we
thought we’d highlight five reasons why you ought to check Eclipse
Juno.

Congratulations to all those involved on the biggest
simultaneous release in software history – now the work begins
towards Kepler! Download it all here.

No. 5 – Koneki

With the world of machine-to-machine messaging gaining
greater importance by the day, this newcomer has arrived at just
the right time to make a big splash.

By 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices,
so clearly they need to become more intelligent to deal with the
noise. Koneki aims to educate many developers about M2M solutions
and provides tools to ease the development, simulation,
testing/debugging and deployment of such
solutions.

Koneki’s main component is an IDE
for Lua, called Lua
Development Tools (LDT), with a goal to overcome the biggest
obstacle that the M2M market faces by providing the components to
learn the embedded-friendly dynamic language for connecting
devices. The potential is great here – and it’s already been
downloaded 8,000 times, says Benjamin Cabe in Java Tech Journal.
Watch this one closely in the coming months.

No.4 – Xtend

Juno symbolises a big day for this Java homage language, as
Xtend hits 1.0, breaking away from being a code-generating and
templating language to a fully-fledged JVM convert. It might say
it’s just Java on its
site, but that’s do it a slight disservice.
It compiles into Java source code but you can
cherry-pick existing Java libraries seamlessly from Xtend and
vice-versa, promising to add a little bit of sugar to Java to make
it work quicker.

It’s easy to learn, cuts out the noise and adds some
horsepower – we interviewed creator Sven Efftinge in Java Tech
Journal as well, where he described it as hopefully doing what
CoffeeScript did for JavaScript. Another one to keep an eye
on.

No.3 – Orion

Eclipse goes down a different track here with its own
dedicated web-tooling platform. Whilst it may seem like a departure
to some, it’s clear that the divide between back-end and front-end
development is beginning to blur.

Eclipse Orion isn’t about embedding Eclipse into the browser but
it’s a completely fresh codebase (in JavaScript) to provide tools
in a web-based architecture. Orion makes it possible to build an
IDE and rich-client applications from within the browser.
Initial signs are good for this project despite not having
a 1.0 release just yet, which is expected by the end of 2012. It
looks
sleek and accessible and should give Eclipse another outlet in
a strange new world.

No.2 – Eclipse Code
Recommenders

Probably the coolest newcomer crashing the party, this neat
little plugin already comes with high acclaim, off the back of
scooping Eclipse’s Most Innovative
Project Award.

Code Recommenders is an extension to Eclipse’s Java
Development Tools that analyzes code of existing
applications, extracts common patterns of how other
developers have used and extended certain APIs before, and
re-integrates this knowledge back into your IDE. It does this in
form of intelligent code completion, extended API documentation,
sophisticated example code search, and even bug detection tools.
It’s one smart cookie – project lead Marcel Bruch tells more in
Java Tech Journal about the project’s inception and plans for the
future.

No 1. – Eclipse 4.2

We saved the biggest for last. After four years of thinking and
development, Eclipse has finally adopted a new Rich Client Platform
in Eclipse 4.x. With 4.0 and 4.1 arriving with Helios and Indigo,
there was a big committer about whether to adopt 4.2 as default in
Juno, and it appears to be the right choice.

It’s a complete renovation bringing a fresh new look to the
workbench, with the ability to mix editors and use detached ones.
E4 brings in a model-based user interface and a new CSS-based
declarative mechanism for application styling, bringing greater
flexibility and also a new services-oriented programming model
that makes it easier to use discreet application services of the
Eclipse platform.

Brian De Alwis details in Java Tech Journal why this is a new
beginning for Eclipse, detailing Eclipse 4’s architecture and
benefits.